The Trad Jazz Revival

[Rabshakeh]

For the past couple of months I have been occasionally joking about the likelihood of Gen Z having a classic jazz revival, following on from the Sea Shanty revival of the pandemic. 

Well, the joke is on me, because it looks like it was already happening.

There is a new club that has opened up behind Kings Cross in London (or moved recently), which specialises in trad jazz and folk nights, and is achieving a measure of success with young people. 

https://www.jamboreevenue.co.uk/upcoming-events/

Pretty mixed stuff that appeals to Tiktok minded Gen Zers: ceilidh, klezmer and cabaret, but the mainstay appears to be traditional jazz.

As jokingly predicted, it all comes wrapped in social media inclusivity-type language that could have been dreamt up by the Babylon Bee or Guido Fawkes blog. The acts look very pastichey, but that's the nature of the TikTok era. And perhaps the original trad jazz revival could be labelled pastichey too. Clearly this sort of stuff is getting bums on seats.

My wife accidentally wandered in there last night and witnessed an Irish folk performance (featuring a hurdy furry) with dancing, that she said was pretty abject, but she was impressed at the number of young people in there.   

[Royal Oak]

Who'd have thought there'd be a Gen Z Mouldy Fig movement? 

[mjazzg]

If your hurdy furry or gurdy?

What is this TikTok of which you speak

[Rabshakeh]

The hurdy was indeed gurdy. Autocorrect hates folk music.

Although fom the context I accept it could have gone either way.

[mjazzg]

I just think autocorrect hates me, as my earlier post indicates...if/is...

I suspect gurdy is preferable 

[Ken Dryden]

There used to be a number of Trad Jazz Parties and often many of the same retirees. The problem is that most of the hosts and attendees have either died or are no longer able to travel. I attended the Choo Choo Festival for several years courtesy of its founder, but hearing several different bands playing “Shake That Thing” in a single day got a bit tiresome.

[JSngry]

Better joints than pizza parlors?

[Rabshakeh]

11 hours ago, Ken Dryden said:

There used to be a number of Trad Jazz Parties and often many of the same retirees. The problem is that most of the hosts and attendees have either died or are no longer able to travel. I attended the Choo Choo Festival for several years courtesy of its founder, but hearing several different bands playing “Shake That Thing” in a single day got a bit tiresome.

I'm reasonably interested in the idea of those festivals. I understand that they went on for decades, with an ecosystem of fan favourite amateur bands, each inhabiting fiercely exclusionary sub-genres, that turned up to them every time, selling records that in some cases were greatly influential on other amateur bands in their particular micro-niches, until with the turn of the decades, they gradually died off. 

There's a 'great' series of articles about the scene by a writer called Tex Wyndham which are republished at the moment in the Syncopated Times: https://syncopatedtimes.com/tex-wyndham-texas-shout/

The articles are that kind of self-critical but still can't even identify the wood for the trees production that only a deep insider could produce. 

[Ken Dryden]

For speaking to some of them, I got the idea that many of them had weekday careers and traveled on the weekends.

The guy who hosted the Atlanta Jazz Party had a mix of styles, but nothing later than swing. He booked Howard Alden one year and he was complaining about his lines like a moldy fig. Usually there were rotating mixes of bands with the stipulation that no song be repeated all weekend long. Ernie Carson was the exception for a few years and he grew old in a hurry, though that was my introduction to Cynthia Sayer, who played drums with him and was occasionally featured on banjo. 

The party always ended with a jam on "Just A Closer Walk With Thee."

He had a few of the acts recorded and gathered musicians at times to record in the studio. I was invited to two of them and enjoyed it immensely, though seeing Kenny Davern go into an extended stream of obscenities about something we couldn't figure out was a bit odd. He was never invited back to join Bob Wilber again.